I'm curious about how native speakers actually respond to the simple question of 「お元気ですか。」 I'm currently going into my third year of studying Japanese. My first-year Japanese professor impressed upon ...

I recently saw a video on greetings in Japan and the guy said something that I've never heard before: "you cannot use こんにちは more then once per day to the same person". He proceeded to explain that if ...

I came across a learn-Japanese book from the 1980s and wanted to know what you guys think. The book gave a general formula for introduction and here is how it goes:
Someone says their name with any ...

I've heard in anime that close friends greet each other saying 'yo', as if it were the same in English when you say "yo!". I've been searching how to write it, but I have only found the common ways to ...

For years I have been saying "またまた" for "see you" to Japanese people I meet. Well at least half the time, since I also often say "またね".
But only tonight for the first time did anybody pick me up on ...

When I'm contacting a colleague for the first time and we're communicating online, I can use はじめまして as part of my greeting. Likewise, if I'm meeting someone for the first time and it is an in-person ...

Is いらっしゃいませ only used by staff, or is it used in other circumstances?
When I was at a dinner at a restaurant being held after a programmers' meetup, I thought that I heard it being used by one of the ...

When giving a talk on Japanese, How to talk like a ge1sha, I made a terrible mistake: I invited someone who knew something about the language along.
The only times he heckled me was when he reckoned ...

Today as I was transferring trains in Nagoya the station attendant was shouting repeatedly「ありがとうございや」. Doing a search on the internet revealed that this seems to be a shorted form of ありがとうございやした but I ...

Despite its being one of the most basic element of daily-life Japanese, I often find myself looking for a proper way to end certain phone conversations.
Of course, I know the standard: [それでは]失礼します, ...

I frequently pass by an elderly neighbor who lives in the same apartment when coming home from a dog walk. He's kind of an in-house carpenter for the building and is frequently seen around the garage. ...

Whenever I communicate with my Japanese coworkers, I always finish my emails with どうぞよろしくお願いします。I guess in the context of an email in English it could be akin to saying "Cheers" "Regards", so I unless ...